Life on the Inside

I’m in a weird place. Last week I was an Adobe community member, now I am an employee. Last week I thought I knew hidden unspoken motivations behind Adobe’s actions, now I know I didn’t even come close to guessing them. Last week Ben Forta was that guy on the stage giving keynotes, now he’s my boss’ boss.

Mind you, I’m not complaining, it’s as awesome a gig as I’ve imagined, but it’s still a shock to the system. But I figured, while I’m still fluent in being a community member, I’d share some observations before they slipped away.

Things I Expected:

• Every one else here is really fracking smart.
• There are good reasons for certain stances and positions from Adobe that don’t make sense externally
• Most of the not sharing those reasons is driven by legal considerations

Things that surprised me:

• How much my co-workers listen to the community without necessarily piping in. They hear your complaints, even if they don’t tell you. They take them to the engineers even if the problem can’t be fixed for the next release.
• Just how affected any one product is effected by the others. For example, certain management processes for CF or Flex have to work for Photoshop or Premiere as well. Some issues that come up again and again are due to this. It’s why the answer to “Why don’t you just switch to…” isn’t always as simple as “just switching to…”
• Internally, there is a lot of affection for our customers. I think this was hit home to me, when one of my co-workers who has a tendency to rile up his particular community said pretty forcefully that “we created [the technology], and we’re not going to let our developers down.” Just writing that, it doesn’t seem too mind blowing, but it was yelled, at 1:00 in the morning, in 20 degree weather, so the passion was in the moment.

All in all, I’m in awe that I get to work here. I can’t wait to see what I learn next week.